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Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has had a varied career in publishing and related fields. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters on large online legal products. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

There's one every year, and 2014 gets its entry early from self-publishing superstar Hugh Howey.

As usual, he thinks that everything that has actually worked for many multi-million dollar companies, in the US and around the world -- and continues to work, year after year, producing products and paying thousands of salaries -- is completely wrong, but he, one guy in his basement, has The One True Solution which will be vastly better.

This post may expand, if I have time to dig into his list later on. And not all of his suggestions are completely stupid. But they represent the usual profound misunderstanding of what publishing is and does -- and, more importantly, what Amazon is and what kind of market it represents -- that we always see from self-published authors.

Just to whet your whistle, I'll note that his #6 is actually about "most favored nation" clauses, not "escalator clauses." And it would require a publisher to renegotiate all of its existing contracts to change language in a way that would be unfavorable to the authors and agents. Yes, that is likely to happen. Not even Chris Christie can strongarm people that much.